Celebrate the Rose Parade gay wedding: Opinion

Why not? Straights get hitched while rolling up Orange Grove and down Colorado boulevards all the time. At first it was unusual, unprecedented, even. Now it’s a normal part of everyday life.

Just like gay marriage.

Celebrate normality, Tournament of Roses! Congratulations to this year’s Tournament President Scott Jenkins and all his White Suiters. It’s not just the 125th TofR and the 100th Rose Bowl Game. 2014 will be the year in which the essentially and even properly tradition-bound parade recognizes how rapidly Californians’ thinking and feeling about marriage equality has evolved.

That great Angeleno Vin Scully as grand marshal, and now this? The parade will truly be a toast to our best values.

I told KPPC reporter Josie Huang on air the other day that, yeah, old-time Tournament guys I know whose time was the ’50s and ’60s would be spinning in their graves at the news. She didn’t have room for the rest of the quote: It wasn’t that those friends and family members were particularly homophobic: It was that society wasn’t then ready for such changes.

Now it is, and who says there’s no such thing as progress?

We’ll be cheering for your love and roaring for your parade kiss, Danny Leclair and Aubrey Loots. May your ceremony be fun, and may your marriage be long and prosperous.

That absurd parade-boycott threat by some lone San Diegan? Laugh it off. Mazel tov!

Larry Wilson is a member of the Los Angeles News Group editorial board. larry.wilson@langnews.com